‘London Bridge is down’: the secret plan for the days after the Queen’s death

The long read: She is adored around the world. She has outlived 12 US presidents. She stands for stability and guild. But her dominion is in turmoil, and her themes are in denial that her predominate is to be able to resolve. Thats why the palace has a plan.

In the plans that exist for the deaths among the Queen and there are many forms, held by Buckingham Palace, the government and the BBC most is considered that she will die after a short illness. Her family and doctors will be there. When the Queen Mother passed away on the afternoon of Easter Saturday, in 2002, at the Royal Lodge in Windsor, she had time to telephone sidekicks to say goodbye, and to give away some of her horses. In these last hours, the Queens elderly doctor, a gastroenterologist mentioned Professor Huw Thomas, will be in charge. He will look after his patient, restraint access to her room and hold what information should be made public. The bond between sovereign and topics is a strange and predominantly unknowable thought. A nations life becomes a persons, and then the string must break.

There will be reports from the palace not many, but enough. The Queen is suffering from great physical prostration, is complemented by indications which induce much feeling, announced Sir James Reid, Queen Victorias physician, two days before her death in 1901. The Kings life is moving quietly towards its close, was the final notice issued by George Vs doctor, Lord Dawson, at 9.30 pm during the night of 20 January 1936. Not long afterwards, Dawson injected the emperor with 750 mg of morphine and a gram of cocaine enough to kill him twice over in order to ease the ruler suffering, and to have him expire in time for the printing press of the Times, which rolled at midnight.

Her seeings will be closed and Charles will be king. His siblings will kiss his hands. The first official be addressed with the word is likely to be Sir Christopher Geidt, the Queens private secretary, a former official who was given a second knighthood in 2014, in part for scheming her succession.

Geidt will contact the prime minister. The last-place time a British ruler succumbed, 65 years ago, the downfall of George VI was conveyed in a code text, Hyde Park Corner, to Buckingham Palace, to prevent switchboard hustlers from finding out. For Elizabeth II, the plan for what happens next is known as London Bridge. The “ministers ” will be awake, if she is not already awake, and civil servants will say London Bridge is down on lock strands. From the Foreign office Global Response Centre, at an undisclosed orientation in the capital city, the bulletin will go out to the 15 authorities outside the UK where the Queen is also the head of state, and the 36 other nations of the Commonwealth for whom she has sufficed as a symbolic figurehead a appearance familiar in dreams and the untidy gleans of a billion schoolchildren since the dawning of the atomic age.

For a era, she will be gone without our to hear about it. The info will walk like the compressional brandish ahead of an shake, detectable simply by special gear. Governors general, representatives and prime ministers will memorize firstly. Cupboards will be opened in search of pitch-black armbands, three-and-a-quarter inches wide-eyed, to be worn on the left arm.

The rest of us will find out more quickly than before. On 6 February 1952, George VI was found by his valet at Sandringham at 7.30 am. The BBC did not broadcast the report until 11.15 am, nearly four hours later. When Princess Diana expired at 4am neighbourhood era at the Piti-Salptrire hospital in Paris on 31 August 1997, journalists accompanying the former foreign ministers, Robin Cook, on a call to the Philippines knew within 15 instants. For many years the BBC was told about royal extinctions first, but its monopoly on broadcasting to the territory has gone now. When the Queen dies, the notice will go out as a newsflash to the Press Association and the countries of the world media simultaneously. At the same jiffy, a footman in mourning invests will emerge from a door at Buckingham Palace, cross the dull pink gravel and pin a black-edged discover to the gates. While he does this, the palace website will be transformed into a sombre, single sheet, depicting the same verse on a dark background.

Screens will brighten. There will be tweets. At the BBC, the radio alarm transmission system( Rats ), will be activated a cold war-era horrify designed to withstand an attack on the nations infrastructure. Rats, “whos also” sometimes referred to under as royal is fully prepared to snuff it, is a near mythical part of the intricate architecture of ritual and rehearsals for the death of major royal identities that the BBC has maintained since the 1930 s. Most personnel have just been ever seen it work in research; many have never seen it work at all. Whenever there is a strange noise in the newsroom, person always asks, Is that the Rats? Because we dont know what it is just like, one regional reporter told me.

All news organisations will scramble to get cinemas on breeze and obituaries online. At the Guardian, the agent writer has a directory of prepared tales pinned to his wall. The Times is said to have 11 epoches of coverage ready to go. At Sky News and ITN, which for years practised the death of the Queen substituting the figure Mrs Robinson, calls will go out to royal experts who have already signed contracts to express alone on those paths. I am going to be sitting outside the doors of the Abbey on a hugely extended trestle table commentating to 300 million Americans about this, one told me.

For people stuck in commerce, or with Heart FM on in the background, there will only be the subtlest of indications, at first, that something is going on.Britains commercial radio stations have a system of blue obit ignites, which is tested once a week and supposed to do now light up in cases where there a national devastation. When the news breaches, these flares will start twinkling, to notify DJs to switch to the word in the next few minutes and to play inoffensive music in the meantime. Every terminal, down to infirmary radio, has prepared music schedules made up of Mood 2( pathetic) or Mood 1( saddest) songs to reaching for in times of abrupt lament. If you ever hear Recurred Dancehall( Nursery Remix) by Sabres of Paradise on daytime Radio 1, turn the TV on, wrote Chris Price, a BBC radio producer, for the Huffington Post in 2011. Something appalling has just happened.

Having programs in place for the death of preceding royals is a practice that establishes some writers awkward. There is one story which is deemed to be so much more important than others, one former Today programme producer complained to me. For 30 times, BBC news crews were hauled to work on quiet Sunday mornings to play mock storylines about the Queen mother suffocate on a fishbone. There was formerly a scenario about Princess Diana succumbing in a auto clang on the M4.

These well-laid proposes have not always helped. In 2002, when the Queen Mother died, the obit sunlights didnt go up because person failed to push the button down properly. On the BBC, Peter Sissons, the ex-serviceman fix, was criticized by wearing a brownish-red knot. Sissons was the main victims of a BBC policy change, issued after the September 11 criticizes, to moderate the insurance coverage and reduce the number of category one royals eligible for the full obituary procedure. The last words in Sissonss ear before going on breeze were: Dont go overboard. Shes a very old woman who had to go some time.

But there will be no extemporising with the Queen. The newsreaders will wear black suits and black ties. Category one was cleared for her. Programme will stop. Systems will coalesce. BBC 1, 2 and 4 will be interrupted and revert quietly to their respective idents an exercise class in a village auditorium, a swan waiting on a pond before coming together for the bulletin. Listeners to Radio 4 and Radio 5 live will hear a particular formulation of words, This is the BBC from London, which, intentionally or not, will summon a feel of national emergency.

The main reason for rehearsals is to have words that are roughly approximate to the moment. It is with the greatest regret that we realize the following proclamation, said John Snagge, the BBC presenter who acquainted the world of the death of George VI.( The word was recurred seven days, every 15 instants, and then the BBC get silent for five hours ). Harmonizing to one former head of BBC news, a very similar placed of words will be used for the Queen. The rehearsals for her are different to the other members of the family, he clarified. People become upset, and entertain the unthinkable oddness of her absence. She is the only monarch that most of us have ever known, he said. The imperial touchstone will appear on the screen. The national anthem will play. You will remember where you were.

When parties think of a contemporary royal extinction in Britain, they imagine, inescapably, of Diana. The pas of the Queen will be stupendous by comparison. It may not be as nakedly emotional, but its contact will be wider, and its consequences more dramatic. It will be quite fundamental, as one former courtier told me.

Part of the effect will come from the overwhelming heavines of things happening. The procedure for modern imperial burials is more or less familiar( Dianas was based on Tay Bridge, the plan for the Queen mother ). But the deaths among a British ruler, and the accession negotiations of a brand-new head of state, is a ritual that is passing out of living storage: three of the Queens last-place four prime ministers were born after she came to the throne. When she croaks, both houses of parliament will be recalled, people will go home from run early, and helicopters captains will announce the word to their fares. In the nine epoches that follow( in London Bridge intend documents, these are known as D-day, D +1 and so on) “theres been” ritual decrees, a four-nation tour by the brand-new ruler, bowdlerised television programming, and a diplomatic gather in London not witnessed since the death of Winston Churchill in 1965.

More overwhelming than any of this, though, there will be an almighty psychological calculate for the dominion that she leaves behind. The Queen is Britains last-place living link with our former greatness the nations id, its problematic self-regard which is still defined by our victory in the second largest world war. One extending historian, who like most people I interviewed for this article declined to be called, should be pointed out that the parting for this countrys longest-serving monarch will be magnificent. Oh, she will get everything, he said. We were all told that the funeral of Churchill was the requiem for Britain as a great power. But actually it has certainly be over when she goes.

Unlike the US presidency, say, monarchies countenance immense pieces of meter a century, in some cases to become entwined with private individuals. The second Elizabethan age is likely to be remembered as a reign of uninterrupted national deterioration, and even, if she lives long enough and Scotland departs the union, as one of deterioration. Life and politics at the end of her govern is likely to be unrecognisable from their majesty and innocence at its beginning. We dont accuse her for it, Philip Ziegler, the historian and royal biographer, was just telling me. We have slumped with her, so to speak.

The obituary movies will remind us what a two countries she acquired. One patch of footage will be played time and time again: from her 21 st birthday, in 1947, when Princess Elizabeth was on holiday with her mothers in Cape Town. She was 6,000 miles from home and comfortably within the sallow of the British Empire. The princess sits at a table with a microphone. The darknes of a tree plays on her shoulder. The camera accommodates three or four times as she talks, and on every occasion, she twitches momentarily, deluding tiny flashings of noble sorenes. I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service, and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong, she says, enunciating vowels and a perception of the world that have both vanished.

It is not uncommon for a country to succumb to a position of denial as a long section in its history is about to end. When “its become” public that Queen Victoria was dying, at the age of 82, a widow for half her life, stunned sorrow swept the country, wrote her biographer, Lytton Strachey. In the minds of her topics, the queens fatality had now become unimaginable; and with her downfall, everything was abruptly at risk, placed in the handwritings of an elderly and untrusted heir, Edward VII. The wild waters are upon us now, wrote the American Henry James, who had endeavoured to London 30 years before.

The parallels with the unease that we will seem at the death of Elizabeth II are obvious, but without the consolation of Britains status in 1901 as the worlds most successful country. We have to have narratives for royal events, the historian told me. In the Victorian predominate, everything went better and better, and big and bigger. We certainly cant was well known that narrative today.

The result is a huge objection to even “ve been thinking about” let alone talking or writing about what happens when the Queen dies. We avoid the subject as we eschew it in our own families. It seems like good manners, but it is also fear. The reporting for this article committed dozens of interviews with broadcasters, government officials, and varied palace personnel, various of whom have worked on London Bridge immediately. Almost all insisted on complete privacy. This meeting never happened, I was told after one conversation in a gentlemen club on Pall Mall. Buckingham Palace, meanwhile, has a policy of not provide comments on funeral arrangements for members of the royal family.

And hitherto this taboo, like much to do with the empire, is not entirely rational, and disguises a parallel world. The next enormous rupture in Britains national life has, in fact, been planned to the time. It involves matters of major public important, will be paid for by us, and is clearly going to happen. Harmonizing to the Office of National Statistics, a British lady who reaches the age of 91 as the Queen will in April has an average life expectancy of four years and 3 month. The Queen is approaching the end of her predominate at a time of maximum disquiet about Britains place in the world, at a few moments when internal political strains are close to breaking her field apart. Her extinction will also release its own destabilising powers: in the accession negotiations of Queen Camilla; in the optics of a new ruler who is already an old boy; and in the future of the Commonwealth, the claimed invention largely of her fabrication.( The Queens title of Head of the Commonwealth is not hereditary .) Australias prime minister and captain of the opposition parties both miss the country to become a republic.

Coping with the lane these events fall is the next great challenge of the House of Windsor, the last European royal family to perform coronations and to persevere with the collusion of a eager populace in the supernatural of the whole endeavour. That is why the planning for the Queens death and its ceremonial aftermath is so extensive. Succession is part of the job. It provides an opportunity for ordering to be affirmed. Queen Victoria had written down the substance of her coffin by 1875. The Queen Mothers burial was practised for 22 times. Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, trained a wintertime and a summertime menu for his funeral lunch. London Bridge is the Queens departure schedule. Its biography, as one of her courtiers said. It will be 10 days of weep and sight in which, instead like the fascinating mirror of the monarchy itself, we will revel in who we were and avoid the question of what we have become.

The idea is for nothing to be unexpected. If the Queen dies abroad, a BAe 146 airplane from the RAFs No 32 squadron, known as the Royal Flight, will take off from Northolt, at the western fringe of London, with a coffin on board. The imperial morticians, Leverton& Sons, prevent what they call a first call coffin ready in case of imperial emergencies. Both George V and George VI were buried in oak grown on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk. If the Queen expires there, their own bodies will come to London by auto after a day or two.

The most elaborated strategies are for what happens if she passes away at Balmoral, where she invests three months of the year. This will trigger an initial ripple of Scottish communion. First, the Queens body will lie at rest in her smallest palace, at Holyroodhouse, in Edinburgh, where she is traditionally patrolled by the Royal Company of Archers, who wear eagle plumages in their bonnets. Then the coffin will be carried up the Royal Mile to St Giless cathedral, for a service of reception, before being put on board the Royal Train at Waverley station for a sad progress down the east coast mainline. Crowds are expected at level crossings and on depot pulpits the length of the two countries from Musselburgh and Thirsk in the north, to Peterborough and Hatfield in the south to hurl buds on the lead teach.( Another locomotive will follow behind, to clear debris from the lines .) Its actually very complicated, one transport official told me.